Cicero to M. Terentius Varro, written at Rome late in 47 or at the start of 46 BC (Perseus: Romae ex.~a.~707 (47) aut in.~a.~708 (46)). This is the opening letter of the great Varro sequence of Ad Familiares book 9 — four or five letters in which Cicero, lately back in Italy after the disaster at Pharsalus and the awkward year of waiting at Brundisium, is beginning to feel his way back into a civic and literary life under Caesar’s sole power. The two men are at the same point: both senior consulars and former Pompeians, both now pardoned and at Rome, both deciding what use to make of an unwanted leisure. Varro is the older, the polymath, the man whose learning Cicero has all his life treated with a half-rivalrous deference; the tone of these letters keeps just that note.

The pivot of the letter is one of Cicero’s most candid sentences about the years of the civil war: “since coming back to the city I have made my peace with my old friends — that is, with our books.” The conceit is allegorical and unforced. He had not stopped reading because he was angry with the philosophers; he had stopped reading because he was ashamed to face them. He had ignored their precepts, joined turbulent affairs and untrustworthy allies, and now comes back, contrite, and is forgiven. Varro, who had stayed with the books all along, is acknowledged as the wiser man — a graceful piece of staged deference that also frames the whole project of the literary years to come. The close is practical: Tusculum, Cumae, or even Rome, anywhere they can be together.